Battle lines for the next election have emerged with starker clarity in the past week. What a Conservative win will mean for Britain is becoming alarmingly clear. Some plans will be in their manifesto but, as in 2010, many will be obscured. Will voters be more wary after British Prime Minister David Cameron’s remarkable charade of moderation last time — all that green, family-friendly, all-in-it-togetherness?
A Conservative win looks almost certain to propel Britain out of the European Union (EU). Cameron presents himself as a renegotiator, but he is heading — through incompetence, indifference or his own gut instinct — towards the exit. The chance of achieving reforms that appease his party for an “In” campaign looks vanishingly small. A majority of his MPs are either “outs” or else “no fear” negotiate-with-a-gun. Michael Gove, Philip Hammond and Owen Paterson already say they will quit rather than keep the status quo. The dangerously complacent view is that common sense will prevail. The combined force of the CBI, TUC, Cameron and his sensibles, Labour and Lib Dems can win a referendum. Wolfgang Schuble, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s right-hand man, this week said: “Historically, politically, democratically, culturally, Great Britain is entirely indispensable for Europe.” But not indispensable enough to make 27 countries concede big changes requiring a treaty that triggers a host of referendums. Free movement of labour will never be amended by poor nations that rely on it.
A Tory party newly triumphant will not be emollient: Cameron may well join the Outs. The drumbeat of Murdoch, the Telegraph, Mail and Express will overwhelm rational argument. Look at their jubilation already: The Sunday Times leader this week denied Treasury figures showing 3.3 million British jobs were linked to EU membership and said Jean-Claude Juncker’s appointment had “indeed pushed us close to the exit”. The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh, who speaks his master’s voice through a foghorn, writes: “I am told Mr Cameron will signal shortly that without real EU reform on immigration and other key demands, he will indeed lead an ‘Out’ campaign in Britain’s 2017 referendum. Since he is unlikely to wring those concessions out of a bruised and vengeful Juncker, the clock on Britain’s membership is already ticking.” Murdoch’s “humblest day” was short-lived.
Look back at the AV referendum: The power of the Tory press and a well-financed ‘No’ campaign managed to persuade an electorate deeply disenchanted with existing parties that they did not really want a little more electoral choice. Instead, people were eager to give Nick Clegg a kicking. Cameron’s EU referendum would come at his government’s mid-term low point. In referendums, say the pollsters, people rarely vote on the issue, but on governments. Cameron will negotiate pointing a gun at his own head and in the end, quite reasonably, Europe will say “Shoot”! So a vote for the Conservatives next year amounts to an ‘Out’ vote. If Scotland narrowly stays in the UK this time, they will certainly demand another vote and swing to leave a non-EU England; Wales may follow. Britain will lose its United Nations security Council seat and US presidents forget “special relationship” politesse.
Labour has taken a stout stand in refusing a referendum, coming under fierce attack for denying the people a right to choose. A referendum on their watch would be even more certainly lost, against what would be a Euro-obsessed Tory party led by an ‘Out’. So Labour has no choice but to stand and fight. There is no middle way on this one. Its stand must be: “This is the moment to choose: Vote Ukip or Tory if you want ‘Out’; vote Labour (or Lib Dem) for ‘In’ to save British jobs.” Immigration drives much popular anti-Europeanism, so Labour has no choice but to say immigration is the price for prosperity. Time for gloves off with Ukip voters. Stop pretending a Ukip vote is respectable and call Faragists out as job-destroying racists and xenophobes. Explaining the decision to deny a referendum requires a bolder pro-EU message and a more abrasive anti-Ukip and anti-Tory warning.
Labour lags alarmingly on economic credibility, but Europe is one unassailable issue where Labour stands for economic sanity against reckless Little Englanders. Never mind tax titbits to woo business, Labour’s challenge to every industrialist or financier is to support them as the only party taking this political risk to protect business interests: Ed Balls made a good pitch last Sunday.
Europe may not be the decider for many voters, but it is the totemic example of how extreme a victorious Conservative party will be after 2015. Not since Labour’s 1983 “longest suicide note in history” manifesto has a party planned such a radical prospectus. Then, Labour proposed leaving Nato, unilateral nuclear disarmament, renationalising British Telecom and shipbuilding, abolishing the second chamber and leaving Europe.
From Cameron mark 2, expect the effective dismantling of much of the BBC and marketisation of the rest of the National Health Service. Gove plans chains of for-profit schools. National pay rates will be broken, paying public servants in already poor places less. Beecroft’s “fire at will” deregulations will be back. The juggernaut of cuts to come, still only half done, will hit even harder, says the Institute of Fiscal Studies, since tax rises and capital cuts are already banked, leaving deeper service and staff cuts.
More tax cuts and shrinking benefits are certain. Bids are finalised for the 800 million probation-service contract, outsourcing a core justice function warned against by the National Audit Office; next will be Gove’s postponed outsourcing of child protection. All this adds up to an isolated England with a denuded state, irrelevant abroad and increasingly unequal at home.
The EU referendum campaign will encourage xenophobia. Benefit cuts will urge mean-spiritedness that despises those below, to distract from a swelling plutocracy above. The Tories and their press denounce Labour policies as extreme, a throwback to the 1970s, anti-business, economically unsound and so on. Compared to the next Cameron agenda, Labour’s modest mansion tax, return to the 50 p rate, jobs guarantee and 200,000 homes a year, all cemented into current spending and benefit caps, are remarkably prudent — too tame, Jon Cruddas and others complain. With next year’s result more unpredictable than any election for decades, Labour’s task is to convey to voters the full enormity of what the Conservatives have in store.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
